News

North America’s largest Islamic organization has elected Ingrid Mattson, a Canadian-born convert and Islamic scholar, as president, making her the first woman to lead any major Muslim organization on the continent.

Longtime civil rights leader Andrew Young has angered Arab, Jewish and Korean leaders for saying that “Mom and Pop” store owners from these three communities had “ripped off” poor urban districts for decades by overcharging them.

When Justice Hugo Black wrote in 1948 for the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, “The First Amendment has erected a wall between the church and the state which must be kept high and impregnable,” he was acting to bar required religious classes from public schools, in a case called McCollum v. Board of Education.

Benjamin Weir, a former Presbyterian missionary who was held hostage for more than a year in Beirut two decades ago and has maintained friends in Lebanon ever since, says failure to reach a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East is at the root of the violence that recently tore that nation apart.